New observations of urban climates – remote sensing and crowd sourcing
Despite 200 years of urban climate research and urging urban challenges globally consistent and dense urban weather observations are still missing. Such weather observations have always reflected technological and social developments, and the rapidity of technological and social change in the past decade is unprecedented. In particular, this comprises huge datasets from two sources, namely satellite earth observation and crowd sourcing. For remote sensing two aspects constitute a new phenomenon: the ever increasing availability, accuracy and resolution of satellite sensors and changes the data policies of relevant players permitting free access to their archives. This now allows time series analysis and multi-sensor data fusion instead of analysis of a single or few selected acquisitions. Crowd sourcing on the other hand refers to the trend that citizens as well as distributed private sensors become increasingly involved in the important sources of geographic information lately. While the involvement of amateurs has long tradition in other disciplines, it is still underexploited in atmospheric sciences, which is partly due to knowledge gaps and partly due to justified concerns in the data quality and standardisation. In this presentation case studies from both domains are highlighted to evaluate the overall potential for globally consistent urban monitoring.